I am a knight and it is my life’s purpose to protect the weak and destroy the wicked. If possible, I should prefer to procure for myself a princess as wife and patron, and gain long-term employment in these two expert capacities. If, that is, one may condescend to refer to such noble tasks with the same disparaging nomenclature one uses for mere administration, or drudgery of the kind undertaken by the average publican. However, there is little chance of my ever joining the ranks of any average position whatever, for the following reason:
Due to a particular circumstance, I cannot remove my armour, which is chitinous, made of solid plates, and of a startling bright orange concentration. My eyes shine forth through gaps in the helmet, but I am otherwise completely obscured by this raiment. As such, my only vocation is knighthood – knighthood or death.
It is unfortunate that I have as of yet been unable to find a lady worth the defence; they hide within their castles – those indomitable round-walled rough cylinder fortresses studded with gates and protrusions and keeps and dungeons and towers and of all different colours and shapes and sizes – and I only manage to catch a glimpse of a face itself armoured just like my own. Do they avoid my peculiar countenance? I am clad in a bizarre colour, I admit, but this is nothing to contradict or otherwise tarnish my otherwise valorous countenance, and I have completed a number of noble quests. The sand has parted beneath my feet and I have clambered over endless fields of stone and lichen in search of my journey’s end; more than once I have contended with the forces of Satan, trickfully beautiful forms, eldritch angels from the sky above, that void which darkens when evil approaches. I have bitten at his demons’ claws with my lance and sword – pin-pricks from our perspective, but sufficient to force a retreat. By all accounts I am a hero. Yet I search for everything in vain.
~
I have been visited by disaster; I have been whisked away by a demon! A silver, web-like, flying monster has caught me up in its voluminous body and pulled me through the edge of the sky. There is no atmosphere up here. All is a rainbow void and there is nothing to hold on to, only a devil’s long silver claw, and I struggle not to be crushed in the grip by the others it picked up alongside me. We jostle for space and fly through the void, and a long time passes in a white close nothingness.
I sleep.
Then, there is a hard floor – hard, polished stone, and there is a figure – a terrible beast, leering down at me with wide eyes and laughing, gleefully laughing, and then I am picked up and fly through the void again only to make contact with blessed air. A pocket of blessed atmosphere. Although, it is a close quarter, a smooth silver cylinder. And what on earth is happening? It seems to be getting hotter and hotter…
verso folio 